Toy Story 2

A few blocks away from where we used to live on Belmont Street in Portland, Oregon, there is one of the oddest museums I’ve ever seen. It’s Kidd’s Toy Museum, and it is housed more or less in an auto parts and repair shop. You would never find it if you didn’t know what you were looking for. Part of it is on one side of the street, and part is in another building, sort of stashed in ... Read more »

Toy Story 3

And so we come to what I thought would be the end of the saga of Woody, Buzz, and all their fiber and plastic friends, who endure the oddness of collapsing lifelessly whenever a human being is observing them—you think it’s a quantum mechanical phenomenon, like Schrödinger’s cat?—so they can enjoy being loved and played with, sometimes pretty roughly, by the children they love. In 1 ... Read more »

Toy Story 4

By the time a franchise is tacking a 4 onto the end of the title, it is almost always burned out, recycling the same old stuff, the magic long since gone away. This is true even of Pixar, who I had hoped would know better, but they went ahead and made the entirely unnecessary Cars 2 and Cars3. But not this one. I found this entry to be ... Read more »

Toys

This should have been the excellent Barry Levinson’s take on Willy Wonka, and it was apparently a heartfelt project … but all the visual splendor and whimsy just doesn’t add up to anything.

Tracks

In America there is the Appalachian Trail, 2200 miles long and a very tough hike, but only the bunny course compared to the Pacific Crest Trail, which starred in the recent movie Wild. There is nothing like it in Australia, so far as I know, so a crazy woman named Robyn Davidson made her own. Starting out in what must be the most godawful town in the ... Read more »

Trading Places

It’s about the old nature-nurture debate. Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche, two horrible old billionaire brothers, make a bet, one claiming that it’s all about genetics, the other that it’s all about how one was raised, in what sort of environment. To that end, they totally ruin the life of Dan Aykroyd, a smug and smarmy member of the upper classes, and put Eddie Murphy, a fast-talking ... Read more »

Traffic

I guess if the message has not penetrated by now, it never will: The war on drugs was over a long time ago. And guess what?

Drugs won!

They will always win, and the battle fought over them will continue to destroy lives … unless we finally admit that the American problem does not have its roots in Mexico. It is right here in the Good Ol’ U. S. of ... Read more »

Trafic

Raymond Chandler was a genius who wrote six novels and a book or two of short stories from 1939 to 1953. His influence is felt even today in the genre of hard-boiled detective fiction, and indeed, in literature in general. Then in 1958 he wrote a pathetic little item called Playback, that I believe would not even have been published if it hadn’t had the Chandler ... Read more »

Trailer Park Boys

Julian and Ricky are the focus of a group of losers in a big trailer park in Nova Scotia. A documentary crew are following them around after they get out of jail, I guess hoping to see how they reform themselves. Julian and Ricky are dumb. They are really, really dumb. How dumb are they? Well, there are more than 6 billion people in the world. Eliminate the mentally retarded (they have an ... Read more »

The Train

One of the better train movies, and one of the better WWII movies. Burt Lancaster is a stationmaster in the last days of Occupied France. Paul Scofield is an art-loving Nazi colonel who intends to steal a trainload of “degenerate” art he has been assembling. The Resistance wants the train stopped before it reaches Germany. (This is “based on fact,” but the real story is that the French ... Read more »